


Mile 704

by scioscribe



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Curing Your Boyfriend's Scurvy, Huddling For Warmth, M/M, Pining, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-24
Updated: 2018-12-24
Packaged: 2019-08-20 23:14:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16564931
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: Near the end of a long trek, Crozier and Fitzjames reach a kind of milestone.





	Mile 704

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ias](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ias/gifts).



By now they are almost a procession of ghosts.  Though ghosts are at least beyond their pains, their sore feet and blackened patches of frostbite, their bruises and blisters, their bleeding gums—the surviving Terrors and Erebites haven’t that luck.  Still, they look fresh from the charnel house, and there are a hundred miles still to go.

Their numbers have dwindled.  Francis is sure he will answer before God for each and every lost man—all the more so once his response to the deaths becomes one of numbed gratitude that they will have fewer mouths to feed and, worse, that it is one man and not another.  They have given up on burying their dead; now they only cover the bodies with stones.  They cannot burn them anymore, for the smell—

Francis does not look too closely at their dead.  He knows—he _accepts_ —that they do not always reach their cairns whole.  They are starving, of course.  Even when they find a Netsilik settlement, even when their lives are saved by it, there is not enough food to put flesh back on their bones, not enough to last.  Desperation makes a grave a butcher’s block and by now, when they have come this far, it’s each man’s choice whether or not he’ll take up his knife and make a cut.  He can’t judge them for it, not now.

Especially since he stole from them.  He can think of it no other way.

Hundreds of miles back, they had a seal, a gift from Lady Silence, whom they’d not seen for weeks.  One look at the animal told Francis how she’d come by it—the claw marks were scored deep, cutting through the layers of blubber.  He saw too that it had already been partly butchered.  She’d needed to feed herself, of course, and, he imagined, Goodsir as well.  She would have taken it to Goodsir first.

“He listens to you now, then,” Francis said.  “The _tuunbaq_.”

She didn’t exactly nod, but she lowered her eyes a little.  It was not something she could explain.

“Thank you.”  He pressed her hand in his.  “Thank you for bringing this to us.  Even after everything.”

Silence tapped the seal’s small, bristly head with two fingers and looked at him.

“Its head.  Its brain?”

She nodded and pulled down her lower lip, showing her gums, her intact teeth.  No scurvy, she was saying.  Seal brain—no scurvy.  Seeing this register in his eyes, she pointed to James’s bed, to James’s back, for he lay facing the tent wall, lost in the drugged sleep that was now his only respite.  Again, she touched the seal’s head.

“Eating it will cure him,” Francis said softly.  “Or—help him, at least.”

Silence tilted her head a little to the side as if to say, _Maybe._

He felt tears in his eyes, the warmest thing he’d felt in weeks.  “Thank you.”  Simple, inadequate.  He would have given her anything, but they had long since run out of things to give.

She laid her hand briefly against his wrist, nodded again, and then left him.

James was far from the only man in their camp sickened in this way, not even the only one at death’s door from it, but he was the only one to whom Francis gave Silence’s remedy, and James lived while other men died.  Even now, he would make the same choice, would not risk doing otherwise.  James, of course, does not know, can never know, and the men know no more than he does.  They gloried too much in the surprise of fresh meat—half a cure on its own—to think of what wasn’t there, but all the same, Francis would permit them almost anything now.  He owes them that.

A sudden touch on his elbow recalls him to the present.

“I gave the order to stop for the night, sir,” Jopson says quietly.  “I thought you’d prefer it.”

He’s weary, crumbling at the edges.  Jopson won’t say even if he asks, but Francis can imagine how many times the man tried to get his attention before usurping him even in such a mild way.

“Thank you, Jopson.”  He rubs at his eyes.  “Try not to go mad with power.”

Jopson smiles.  His eyes are fever-bright, burning like stars in a pale face, his lips like bruises, but he’s still standing, still walking even, God only knows how.  Francis is beginning to think it’s through sheer willpower alone.  He wants to believe that—that Jopson will never flag, that he is too competent to be done in by any of this.

“If I were going mad with power, sir, I’d order you to bed.  You could dream in truth, then, not just look like your head’s miles away.”

He’s not wrong, but: “Miles back is more like it.”

“That’s no way.  Forward, Captain, or nothing.  After all, it’s only a paltry hundred miles or so from here.  If we get a good second wind, we’ll be there before we know it.”

“Your sense of humor has only deteriorated,” Francis says.

Forward, then.  And going forward, for now, takes him to the same destination as going back.  James.

They have long since abandoned their tents.  He and James have shared bedroll and blanket for miles and months now, and he has almost forgotten what it is to sleep with anything above him but the sky, let alone what it is to sleep with any other body beside him.  They have worked out so many silent accommodations with each other.  His palm under the sharp point of James’s hip, where the joint still pains him even now.  James’s coat thrown over Francis so many times in the night, as if James wakes and, confused or simply superstitious, thinks to keep him from freezing.

Francis doesn’t know when the change came—strange, when he knows the mile marker for everything else.

He promised James brotherhood once, and brotherhood is not what his heart offers up now.  His affections have grown—uncommon.

That might be all that keeps him alive.  He has some guarantee of daily pleasure.  He doubts there are many men in their camp who could say the same.  James is the only sustenance he has that’s not poison as well, which isn’t to say that this can’t kill him.  He knows full well it could, in a thousand different ways.

Supper is quick—with so little, it can hardly be otherwise—and just a hurdle to get over before they can lie down.

“I’m half-afraid sometimes to fall asleep,” Lt. Little said to him once.  “Not that I’ll die in the night, I mean, but I just dread mornings now, sir.  To wake again to more of the same.  I’m sorry.”

“No.  I know just how you feel.”

They all do.  Francis can’t keep home in sight anymore: it is too far away, and all their telescopes have long since been traded off, given as inadequate gifts to their Netsilik hosts.  He walks all day for the sake of the night: for thin, grainy sleep and a word or two with James before exhaustion claims them both.

James, who once could not do without company, does not eat with them that evening; Francis finds him on the perimeter of their poor little camp breaking bits of crumbling ship’s biscuit off with his fingers.

“Francis.”

There: this is as far as he needs to see.  This is the only horizon worth a damn.  He joins James, standing so close to him that their shoulders rub together.  Their coats have grown so threadbare in places that he can feel that hint of touch enough to make him ache.

“An earthquake, I think,” James says, “is what’s called for.  Some colossal shift that would bridge us across the miles, send this part of the earth hurtling toward Fort Discovery.  I intend to petition God for it.”

“If you were going to, you should have done it long ago.  It’s not like you to waste our time.  It’s downhill from here, James—it will be warmer, more thickly settled for us to find more help.”

“Oh, don’t talk as though I need to be bolstered.  I’d hate to think our situation so dire that _you_ must be the cheerful one, God forbid.”  He rubs his hands together and manages a smile: a shadow of his old one, but still one of the finest sights Francis has ever seen.  However widely he’s ranged, this is his truest discovery, his cutting-through to warmer climes.

“Your position is safe,” Francis says dryly.  “I’m sure I can still out-gloom you if need be.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”  James’s face has taken on a curious immobility.  “I can’t decide, you know, whether or not I wish you’d never come here.  Except that I wish none of us had, really, and we might so easily have avoided it.  I’m inclined to damn the eyes of every man above you who turned this expedition down.”

“First earthquakes and now damnation.  You’d give a lively Sunday service, James, if a terrifying one.”

“I never could pen one to Sir John’s satisfaction.  It’s as well for my pride that we can no longer spare the time.  I have all the sincerity, and I should think all the phrasing, but he always felt they somehow fell short.”

“He likely only wanted the honor himself.”

“Perhaps.”  James exhales.  “I’m a better man for all this.  A less trivial one, anyway, so I suppose my soul is improved for coming, if I want to take that into account.  Perhaps I’d write more suitably now.”

“You were always a good man.”

“Still, I—I’d wish you gone from here.  Safely settled somewhere with your Miss Cracroft and a half-dozen yellow-headed, surly-looking children, reading of all this in the papers and praising God for your luck.”

“When we’re home,” Francis says gently, “I’ll be sure not to tell Sophia the fate you wished upon her.  A drunk for a husband and six children in three years’ time.  Any sensible woman would reel back in horror.”

“I suppose the count was a little excessive,” James admits.  “Should she ever hear of it, tender her my apologies.”  The years, and the last few months especially, have made him gaunt; they’ve put his bones in sharp relief.  When Francis looks at him, he sees the old sepia photographs of dashing Commander Fitzjames laid over _his_ James, this weary starved creature with all his courage.  Lies and memories would put flesh on him once more and make him what he was, but when he tries to imagine James at home once again, he cannot, quite.  He doesn’t know that they’ll make it there.

But if they do, they will not be the same men.  There will be no marriage for him, not now.  No children.  He could never give himself away in halves and the whole of him is elsewhere now; the whole of him will always be here, shoulder-to-shoulder with James in an endless succession of cold and unforgiving miles.

“We should sleep,” he says, for they need a change of subject.  He can’t talk of love, not when it will drive him to confessions James will not want to hear.

In their makeshift bed, Francis once more puts his hand against James’s sore hip, curves around it to let him turn on that side.  He lies against James’s back, his face against the soft disorder of James’s hair.

“I must be crushing the blood from your fingers,” James says.  “You’ll lose your hand if you’re not more careful.”

He lets out a mirthless chuff of a laugh.  “I fear you don’t have the weight for that anymore.  You’re light as a feather.”

“How dainty.”

“Never mind keeping you from bruising yourself on the stones, I should put an arm around you to stop you from blowing away.”

There is a slight, horrible pause, long enough for him to realize that while he has truly spoken in jest, it is a jest he would never have made if he were not so idiotically self-indulgent in this love.

But James only rolls over to face him.  In the dark, his face is all shadows.

It’s his good hip now in Francis’s hand, unnecessarily so, and James reaches for him and lays his own hand on Francis’s side.

“One day I’d like to do this and not feel your ribs so,” James says.  “But there.  Now we’re both caught and tethered.”

Their breath mingles together.  They have never lain face-to-face this way, have never touched each other so intimately without the excuse of comfort—though of course it is all comfort.  He is still not sure—not entirely.  But it is no use, he wants to say, for James to wish he had never come; in this moment, Francis can bear the weight of all the choices he’s made, even the worst of them.  He notes what mile they are on, their precise location, as if this is something he could write in a captain’s log.  But that can never be.  They are the only two who will ever know the beginnings of this.


End file.
